This novel felt similar to a poetry collection in that it creates a vibe more than a plot and plays with language, structure, and profundity, sometimes at the cost of clarity. It's brilliant and confusing in turn, leaving me with many highlighted sentences but also many moments where I felt unmoored and thought, okayyy I'd love some straightforward prose right now...

"I'm not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck," Vuong writes. That sentence describes the novel perfectly: fragments of pain and beauty, sometimes in large pieces and sometimes as single sentences, flotsam and jetsam. It makes the work frustrating at times but also captures the feel of PTSD, intergenerational trauma, and memories of complex relationships that held abuse and love in equal measure.

The novel feels very American, too - not the thriving America often shown on TV, but the America kept under the rug, undocumented and unseen by tourists. The dreamless America, stricken by poverty, violence, and addiction but still breathing and grasping at beauty wherever it can be found.

I wouldn't recommend this book to just anyone, since it's a distinct flavor I'm guessing most people wouldn't enjoy. But if you're drawn to poetic queer immigrant shipwrecks, yes. TBR it.

(Also highly recommend listening to Dua Lipa and Ocean Vuong discuss the book for more background and insights! Thanks to @dineke for the tip 😊)

To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

[The great monarch migration. WWF.]

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is beautiful writing. A vivid, deep and difficult read. The intimate scenes felt overly descriptive, but there were many lines that are very well written and they will feel better and more beautiful with each reread. This indeed is a novel that is original, poetic and so real.

This book is narrated in the form of a letter written by a young American writer of Vietnamese origin, to his mother who is illiterate. It is about communicating the difficult times and expressing all those complex memories.

Surely, Vuong's 'On Earth We`re' is totally Gorgeous!

"If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.

From the notes -

"If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin."

==

"At recess the next day, the kids would call me freak, fairy, fag. I would learn, much later, that those words were also iterations of monster."

==

"Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows."

==

"Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears."

==

"Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood."

==

"Through this careful bruising, you heal."

==

"Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself."

==

"We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another."

==

"In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly."

==

"They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it."

== "The truth is we don't have to die if we don't feel like it."

==

"Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness."

==

"It's not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter. We’ll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe."

==

"They say if you want something bad enough you'll end up making a god out of it."

<

3.25

It’s weird because this should be something I loved! It had vignettes, it’s character driven, and was very atmospheric with lyrical writing-but something just didn’t connect for me.

You can tell the author is a poet because it’s more about the carefully chosen wording and flowery prose than any sort of character depth, which kept a wall up that didn’t allow the reader to fully connect in a way. Every word seems perfectly curated (often times leaving me confused what Vuong was trying to say) and felt like the story was more style over substance.

The hardest part for me was that it bounced all over the place. We get different topics from one section to the next, so while I loved some parts others fell flat. It was almost stream of consciousness writing, which is a style I don’t enjoy. Felt philosophical and I couldn’t quite grasp what the author was trying to say in a lot of instances. For example, what was all that nonsense with the "green apple"?!

It’s readable-I finished it but eh it didn’t work for me? I didn’t love it and half the time I felt like I “didn’t get it.” I did enjoy some quotes that I saved so I’d be open to reading Vuong’s poetry collections, I think as a novel his writing style just doesn’t translate as well for me.